by Joe Haldeman
I liked him well enough, though, in spite of this and other differences, and we traveled together for a while. He suggested we not go through the purging here, but have our things sent on to Rome, because we’d want to be outside there, too. There was a daily hop from Alexandria to Rome, an airship that had a section reserved for those of us who could eat and breathe nanophages.
As soon as she was inside the coolness of the ship, White Hill shed the chador and veil and stuffed them under the seat. “Breathe,” she said, stretching. Her white bodysuit was a little less revealing than paint.
Her directness and undisguised sexuality made me catch my breath. The tiny crease of punctuation that her vulva made in the bodysuit would have her jailed on some parts of my planet, not to mention the part of this one we’d just left. The costume was innocent and natural and, I think, completely calculated.
Pao studied her with an interested detachment. He was neuter, an option that was available on Petros, too, but one I’ve never really understood. He claimed that sex took too much time and energy from his art. I think his lack of gender took something else away from it.
We flew about an hour over the impossibly blue sea. There were a few sterile islands, but otherwise it was as plain as spilled ink. We descended over the ashes of Italy and landed on a pad on one of the hills overlooking the ancient city. The ship mated to an airlock so the normal-DNA people could go down to a tube that would whisk them into Rome. We could call for transportation or walk, and opted for the exercise. It was baking hot here, too, but not as bad as Egypt.
White Hill was polite with Lo, but obviously wished he’d disappear. He and I chattered a little too much about rocks and cements, explosives and lasers. And his asexuality diminished her interest in him—as, perhaps, my polite detachment increased her interest in me. The muralist from Shwa, to complete the spectrum, was after her like a puppy in its first heat, which I think amused her for two days. They’d had a private conversation in Chicago, and he’d kept his distance since, but still admired her from afar. As we walked down toward the Roman gates, he kept a careful twenty paces behind, trying to contemplate things besides White Hill’s walk.
Inside the gate we stopped short, stunned in spite of knowing what to expect. It had a formal name, but everybody just called it Òssi, the Bones. An order of Catholic clergy had spent more than two centuries building, by hand, a wall of bones completely around the city. It was twice the height of a man, varnished dark amber. There were repetitive patterns of femurs and rib cages and stacks of curving spines, and at eye level, a row of skulls, uninterrupted, kaymetra after kaymetra.
This was where we parted. Lo was determined to walk completely around the circle of death, and the other two went with him. White Hill and I could do it in our imaginations. I still creaked from climbing the pyramid.
Prior to the ascent of Christianity here, they had huge spectacles, displays of martial skill where many of the participants were killed, for punishment of wrongdoing or just to entertain the masses. The two large amphitheaters where these displays went on were inside the Bones but not under the dome, so we walked around them. The Circus Maximus had a terrible dignity to it, little more than a long depression in the ground with a few eroded monuments left standing. The size and age of it were enough; your mind’s eye supplied the rest. The smaller one, the Colosseum, was overdone, with robots in period costumes and ferocious mechanical animals re-creating the old scenes, lots of too-bright blood spurting. Stones and bones would do.
I’d thought about spending another day outside, but the shelter’s air-conditioning had failed, and it was literally uninhabitable. So I braced myself and headed for the torture chamber. But as White Hill had said, the purging was more bearable the second time. You know that it’s going to end.
Rome inside was interesting, many ages of archeology and history stacked around in no particular order. I enjoyed wandering from place to place with her, building a kind of organization out of the chaos. We were both more interested in inspiration than education, though, so I doubt that the three days we spent there left us with anything like a coherent picture of that tenacious empire and the millennia that followed it.
A long time later she would surprise me by reciting the names of the Roman emperors in order. She’d always had a trick memory, a talent for retaining trivia, ever since she was old enough to read. Growing up different that way must have been a factor in swaying her toward cognitive science.
We saw some ancient cinema and then returned to our quarters to pack for continuing on to Greece, which I was anticipating with pleasure. But it didn’t happen. We had a message waiting: all must return immediately to amazonia. contest profoundly changed.
Lives, it turned out, profoundly changed. The war was back.
We met in a majestic amphitheater, the twenty-nine artists dwarfed by the size of it, huddled front row center. A few Amazonian officials sat behind a table on the stage, silent. They all looked detached, or stunned, brooding.
We hadn’t been told anything except that is was a matter of “dire and immediate importance.” We assumed it had to do with the contest, naturally, and were prepared for the worst: it had been called off; we had to go home.
The old crone Norita appeared, “We must confess to carelessness,” she said. “The unseasonable warmth in both hemispheres, it isn’t something that has happened, ever since the Sterilization. We looked for atmospheric causes here, and found something that seemed to explain it. But we didn’t make the connection with what was happening in the other half of the world.
“It’s not the atmosphere. It’s the Sun. Somehow the Fwndyri have found a way to make its luminosity increase. It’s been going on for half a year. If it continues, and we find no way to reverse it, the surface of the planet will be uninhabitable in a few years.
“I’m afraid that most of you are going to be stranded on Earth, at least for the time being. The Council of Worlds has exercised its emergency powers and commandeered every vessel capable of interstellar transport. Those who have sufficient power or the proper connections will be able to escape. The rest will have to stay with us and face…whatever our fate is going to be.”
I saw no reason not to be blunt. “Can money do it? How much would a ticket out cost?”
That would have been a gaffe on my planet, but Norita didn’t blink. “I know for certain that two hundred million marks is not enough. I also know that some people have bought ‘tickets,’ as you say, but I don’t know how much they paid, or to whom.”
If I liquidated everything I owned, I might be able to come up with three hundred million, but I hadn’t brought that kind of liquidity with me; just a box of rare jewelry, worth perhaps forty million. Most of my wealth was thirty-three years away, from the point of view of an earthbound investor. I could sign that over to someone, but by the time they got to Petra, the government or my family might have seized it, and they would have nothing save the prospect of a legal battle in a foreign culture.
Norita introduced Skylha Sygoda, an astrophysicist. He was pale and sweating. “We have analyzed the solar spectrum over the past six months. If I hadn’t known that each spectrum was from the same star, I would have said it was a systematic and subtle demonstration of the micro-stages of stellar evolution in the late main sequence.”
“Could you express that in some human language?” someone said.
Sygoda spread his hands. “They’ve found a way to age the Sun. In the normal course of things, we would expect the Sun to brighten about six percent each billion years. At the current rate, it’s more like one percent per year.”
“So in a hundred years,” White Hill said, “it will be twice as bright?”
“If it continues at this rate. We don’t know.”
A stocky woman I recognized as !Oona Something, from Jua-nguvi, wrestled with the language: “To how long, then? Before this Earth is uninhabitable?”
“Well, in point of fact, it’s uninhabitable now, except for people like y
ou. We could survive inside these domes for a long time, if it were just a matter of the outside getting hotter and hotter. For those of you able to withstand the nanophages, it will probably be too hot within a decade, here; longer near the poles. But the weather is likely to become very violent, too.
“And it may not be a matter of a simple increase in heat. In the case of normal evolution, the Sun would eventually expand, becoming a red giant. It would take many billions of years, but the Earth would not survive. The surface of the Sun would actually extend out to touch us.
“If the Fwndyri were speeding up time somehow, locally, and the Sun were actually evolving at this incredible rate, we would suffer that fate in about thirty years. But it would be impossible. They would have to have a way to magically extract the hydrogen from the Sun’s core.”
“Wait,” I said. “You don’t know what they’re doing now, to make it brighten. I wouldn’t say anything’s impossible.”
“Water Man,” Norita said, “if that happens, we shall simply die, all of us, at once. There is no need to plan for it. We do need to plan for less extreme exigencies.” There was an uncomfortable silence.
“What can we do?” White Hill said. “We artists?”
“There’s no reason not to continue with the project, though I think you may wish to do it inside. There’s no shortage of space. Are any of you trained in astrophysics, or anything having to do with stellar evolution and the like?” No one was. “You may still have some ideas that will be useful to the specialists. We will keep you informed.”
Most of the artists stayed in Amazonia, for the amenities if not to avoid purging, but four of us went back to the outside habitat. Denli om Cord, the composer from Luxor, joined Lo and White Hill and me. We could have used the tunnel airlock, to avoid the midday heat, but Denli hadn’t seen the beach, and I suppose we all had an impulse to see the Sun with our new knowledge. In this new light, as they say.
White Hill and Denli went swimming while Lo and I poked around the ruins. We had since learned that the destruction here had been methodical, a grim resolve to leave the enemy nothing of value. Both of us were scouting for raw material, of course. After a short while we sat in the hot shade, wishing we had brought water.
We talked about that and about art. Not about the Sun dying, or us dying, in a few decades. The women’s laughter drifted to us over the rush of the muddy surf. There was a sad hysteria to it.
“Have you had sex with her?” he asked conversationally.
“What a question. No.”
He tugged on his lip, staring out over the water. “I try to keep these things straight. It seems to me that you desire her, from the way you look at her, and she seems cordial to you, and is after all from Seldene. My interest is academic, of course.”
“You’ve never done sex? I mean before.”
“Of course, as a child.” The implication of that was obvious.
“It becomes more complicated with practice.”
“I suppose it could. Although Seldenians seem to treat it as casually as…conversation.” He used the Seldenian word, which is the same as for intercourse.
“White Hill is reasonably sophisticated,” I said. “She isn’t bound by her culture’s freedoms.” The two women ran out of the water, arms around each other’s waists, laughing. It was an interesting contrast; Denli was almost as large as me, and about as feminine. They saw us and waved toward the path back through the ruins.
We got up to follow them. “I suppose I don’t understand your restraint,” Lo said. “Is it your own culture? Your age?”
“Not age. Perhaps my culture encourages self-control.”
He laughed. “That’s an understatement.”
“Not that I’m a slave to Petrosian propriety. My work is outlawed in several states, at home.”
“You’re proud of that.”
I shrugged. “It reflects on them, not me.” We followed the women down the path, an interesting study in contrasts, one pair nimble and naked except for a film of drying mud, the other pacing evenly in monkish robes. They were already showering when Lo and I entered the cool shelter, momentarily blinded by shade.
We made cool drinks and, after a quick shower, joined them in the communal bath. Lo was not anatomically different from a sexual male, which I found obscurely disturbing. Wouldn’t it bother you to be constantly reminded of what you had lost? Renounced, I suppose Lo would say, and accuse me of being parochial about plumbing.
I had made the drinks with guava juice and ron, neither of which we have on Petrosia. A little too sweet, but pleasant. The alcohol loosened tongues.
Denli regarded me with deep black eyes. “You’re rich, Water Man. Are you rich enough to escape?”
“No. If I had brought all my money with me, perhaps.”
“Some do,” White Hill said. “I did.”
“I would too,” Lo said, “coming from Seldene. No offense intended.”
“Wheels turn,” she admitted. “Five or six new governments before I get back. Would have gotten back.”
We were all silent for a long moment. “It’s not real yet,” White Hill said, her voice flat. “We’re going to die here?”
“We were going to die somewhere,” Denli said. “Maybe not so soon.”
“And not on Earth,” Lo said. “It’s like a long preview of Hell.” Denli looked at him quizzically. “That’s where Christians go when they die. If they were bad.”
“They send their bodies to Earth?” We managed not to smile. Actually, most of my people knew as little as hers, about Earth. Seldene and Luxor, though relatively poor, had centuries’ more history than Petros, and kept closer ties to the central planet. The Home Planet, they would say. Homey as a blast furnace.
By tacit consensus, we didn’t dwell on death anymore that day. When artists get together they tend to wax enthusiastic about materials and tools, the mechanical lore of their trades. We talked about the ways we worked at home, the things we were able to bring with us, the improvisations we could effect with Earthling materials. (Critics talk about art, we say; artists talk about brushes.) Three other artists joined us, two sculptors and a weathershaper, and we all wound up in the large sunny studio drawing and painting. White Hill and I found sticks of charcoal and did studies of each other drawing each other.
While we were comparing them, she quietly asked “Do you sleep lightly?”
“I can. What did you have in mind?”
“Oh, looking at the ruins by starlight. The moon goes down about three. I thought we might watch it set together.” Her expression was so open as to be enigmatic.
Two more artists had joined us by dinnertime, which proceeded with a kind of forced jollity. A lot of ron was consumed. White Hill cautioned me against overindulgence. They had the same liquor, called “rum,” on Seldene, and it had a reputation for going down easily but causing storms. There was no legal distilled liquor on my planet.
I had two drinks of it, and retired when people started singing in various languages. I did sleep lightly, though, and was almost awake when White Hill tapped. I could hear two or three people still up, murmuring in the bath. We slipped out quietly.
It was almost cool. The quarter-phase moon was near the horizon, a dim orange, but it gave us enough light to pick our way down the path. It was warmer in the ruins, the tumbled stone still radiating the day’s heat. We walked through to the beach, where it was cooler again. White Hill spread the blanket she had brought, and we stretched out and looked up at the stars.
As is always true with a new world, most of the constellations were familiar, with a few bright stars added or subtracted. Neither of our home stars was significant, as dim here as Earth’s Sol is from home. She identified the brightest star overhead as AlphaKent; there was a brighter one on the horizon, but neither of us knew what it was.
We compared names of the constellations we recognized. Some of hers were the same as Earth’s names, like Scorpio, which we call the Insect. It was about halfway up th
e sky, prominent, imbedded in the galaxy’s glow. We both call the brightest star there Antares. The Executioner, which had set perhaps an hour earlier, they call Orion. We had the same meaningless names for its brightest stars, Betelgeuse and Rigel.
“For a sculptor, you know a lot about astronomy,” she said. “When I visited your city, there was too much light to see stars at night.”
“You can see a few from my place. I’m out at Lake Påchlå, about a hundred kaymetras inland.”
“I know. I called you.”
“I wasn’t home?”
“No; you were supposedly on ThetaKent.”
“That’s right, you told me. Our paths crossed in space. And you became that burgher’s slave wife.” I put my hand on her arm. “Sorry I forgot. A lot has gone on. Was he awful?”
She laughed into the darkness. “He offered me a lot to stay.”
“I can imagine.”
She half turned, one breast soft against my arm, and ran a finger up my leg. “Why tax your imagination?”
I wasn’t expecially in the mood, but my body was. The robes rustled off easily, their only virtue.
The moon was down now, and I could see only a dim outline of her in the starlight. It was strange to make love deprived of that sense. You would think the absence of it would amplify the others, but I can’t say that it did, except that her heartbeat seemed very strong on the heel of my hand. Her breath was sweet with mint, and the smell and taste of her body were agreeable; in fact, there was nothing about her body that I would have cared to change, inside or out, but nevertheless, our progress became difficult after a couple of minutes, and by mute agreement we slowed and stopped. We lay joined together for some time before she spoke.
“The timing is all wrong. I’m sorry.” She drew her face across my arm, and I felt tears. “I was just trying not to think about things.”
“It’s all right. The sand doesn’t help, either.” We had gotten a little bit inside, rubbing.